by hilzoy
Timothy McVeigh called the children he murdered “collateral damage”. Here are some of the ones he missed, ten years later:
There should be nineteen more, and a lot of adults with them. You can read about them here.
I want to repost something I wrote earlier:
One of my favorite passages from C.S. Lewis is this one, which I’ve quoted before:
“The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything—God and our friends and ourselves included—as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.” (Mere Christianity)” (…)
I think the effects of hatred are like (what I’ve seen of) cocaine. At first, it’s exhilarating. It’s fun to see other people being vile and to set yourself in opposition to them. It’s inspiring to go on a crusade. Of course, there is always a crusade at hand and an enemy to be fought, if your tastes run that way: the struggle to be a genuinely decent person, and the fight against your own worst self. But that requires that you actually give up your vices, which can be tiresome. A crusade against other people, like most of the pleasures of fantasy, has none of these drawbacks: it’s all exhilaration, and none of that tedious business of recognizing your own faults and trying to correct them.
As with cocaine, if you stop at this point, not much has been lost. And some people do stop here. But if you don’t keep hatred in check, you come to rely on it more and more, the fun fades, and it corrodes you from within. The more you nurse your hatred, the larger a part of your identity it becomes. But hatred is a poor substitute for a genuine self, and the more you come to depend on it, the hollower you become, and the harder it is to let it go. It eats away at your values: morality, which we ought to use to make ourselves better people and only secondarily to judge others, turns into a tool we use to excoriate those we hate, and to demonstrate, to ourselves and to others, how very, very different we are from them. Crusades are fought by the righteous, and if you need to believe that you are on a righteous crusade, you will of course need to conscript morality to the cause of maintaining your belief that you are on the side of the angels.
At this point, as Lewis said, your view of your opponents is driven by your hatred, rather than the other way around. You need “to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black”, and your needs drive your beliefs. Your intellectual integrity is sacrificed to your psychological needs, your hatred loses any honesty it might once have had, and you surrender to fantasy. This can be hard to undo: once you give up your hold on reality, it’s hard to find your way back. And if you can’t, then you are surrounded by malevolent enemies of your own creation, enemies that can do you real damage even though they are purely imaginary. You are “fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred” which you created in your own image, and which has trapped you.
This is dangerous. I have watched people get into real moral trouble this way. I have no wish to join them. And the only way I know to prevent it is to be absolutely scrupulous about thinking ill of people. If the facts warrant my dislike, so be it. But the moment I find myself wanting to see grey as black, then I know that I’m going wrong. And as C.S. Lewis said, whenever this impulse “bobs its head up, day after day, year after year, all our lives long, we must hit it on the head.” As I said, not just because it’s unjust to think ill of others when they don’t deserve it, or because it’s ignoble, but because it’s poison.
Today is also Abby’s fourth birthday.
September 11 is Emily’s Gotcha Day.
So, we remember the events more than the days on which they occurred.
Thanks Hilzoy. We lived less than a mile from Murrah on that date. The blast created new cracks in our old house.
It was a day I’ll always remember for teaching me that terrorists don’t come in one color.
Love the C.S. Lewis quote. It stopped and made me think, just like it did the last time I saw you quote this passage. It’s great advice, and captures something not often employed in ethical arguments with a subtlety that’s brilliant.
It is amazing when a chain of somewhat random images and ideas can jar you into an unusual emotional state, and I have just experienced one such:
– The image of destruction in Oklahoma city,
– followed by the Lewis quote setting forth so clearly how ugliness and brutality is a consequence, not a cause,
– followed by this from hilzoy: “hatred is a poor substitute for a genuine self”
– Followed by the very idea of “Gotcha Day” which proves – proves, dammit! – that the natural tendencies of the human animal are good…
And suddenly I was fighting back a tear. I’m at work, and I never cry, and all of a sudden an enormous, sad sense of goodwill for this beat-up old world just jumped into my heart and looked up at my brain defiantly, as if to say “Ha! So there!”
Wow. “Gotcha Day.” Wow.
My son, there is a country
Far beyond our seas
There stands a lone warrior
Guarding the weak.
In the midst of the noise and danger
The soldier never sways
Protecting the fallen ones
From being taken away.
Go tell the Politicians
Stranger who passes by,
That here obedient, sons of freedom
Lay waiting to die.
Beside the open casket
Mourners from near & wide
Look at the face of innocence
Who perished, not knowing why.
Crying & wailing fills the air
Pallbearers with crisp steps,
march in together there
Fall in soldier, forward men;
The command officer cried.
Damn, he took the final journey
Well before his time.
As the politicians tally their score
The price of freedom
is at the cost, of much more
My son there is a country
far beyond our seas
Your unmarked grave, is out yonder.
The same person, I’ll never be.
R.M.Lutu.
. . . . the moment I find myself wanting to see grey as black, then I know that I’m going wrong . . .
An impossible dream perhaps, but if everyone found the patience before they acted to question the motives of each of their acts, what a different world we might have.
With apologies in this world of grey, is it possible the world may divided into two groups? In the first assembling are people who ask questions, waiting. In the second are people who rush for answers.
Some say we are defined by what we do or is the world more marked by what we don’t do?
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
W.B. Yeats
Thanks, Hilzoy, for your thoughts.
Well said.
Of course, we have inflicted a hundred Oklahoma Cities upon the innocents of Afghanistan and Iraq.
But they do not count, for they have two strikes against them: They are brown, and they are not Americans.
To march in rememberance of one set of “collateral damage” because they are Americans, while utterly ignoring the plight of another set of “collateral damage”, makes Americans look not only like a bunch of racist bigots, but the biggest hypocrits in the world too.
But I forget, those Afghan and Iraqi children are brown. So they don’t count.
Okay, then…
– Badtux the Irate Penguin
Yes BadTux, we mourn the dead at Oklahoma City, therefore we dance on everyone else’s graves. Makes perfect sense.
::reaches for a sedative::
BadTux
If you want to add something, perhaps spend some time getting to appreciate the tone of the place. Sweeping generalizations don’t go over well here.
Err, in case you weren’t reading my words, I was speaking of America as a whole, not of one or two small subsets like the readers of this board. Pretty much all Americans grieve for the victims of Oklahoma City. But a large subset of Americans actually CELEBRATE the death of brown people overseas. Go over to LittleGreenFootballs if you want to be disgusted. (Sorry, no link to them from me, you’ll have to Google for them if you want to find that repository of nauseating excuses for “humanity”).
And BTW, if you’re offended — what are you feeling guilty about?
– Badtux the Offensive Penguin
And BTW, if you’re offended — what are you feeling guilty about?
Only not banning you straight away, like my gut told me to. Coming in and accusing Americans of being ambivalent about the deaths in Iraq shows only that you’ve never read this blog in detail, or cared to before you starting hurling charges.
I don’t feel guilty about it any longer though, you’ve been temporarily banned (see the rules if you want more information). If you wish to appeal the banning, email the kitty. If not, thanks for playing.
A dear friend lost her husband that day.
My wife’s building, according to F.B.I. reports, was cased by the perpetrators.
This is really what set me off into orbit in 1995. The Lewis quote is one I intend to read and direct toward my own behavior, even if Grover Norquist, who continues his rhetorical magic close to the ear of those who run the show now, doesn’t do the same.
You whose name is aggressor and devourer.
Putrid and sultry, in fermentation.
You mash into pulp sages and prophets,
Criminals and heroes, indifferently.
My vocativus is useless.
You do not hear me, though I address you,
Yet I want to speak, for I am against you.
So what if you gulp me, I am not yours.
You overcome me with exhaustion and fever.
You blur my thought, which protests,
You roll over me, dull unconscious power.
The one who will overcome you is swift, armed:
Mind, spirit, maker, renewer.
He jousts with you in depths and on high,
Equestrian, winged, lofty, silver-scaled.
I have served him in the investiture of forms.
It’s not my concern what he will do with me.
A retinue advances in the sunlight by the lakes.
From white villages Easter bells resound.
Czelaw Milosz
That’s Sup-er Grover to you, bub.
C.S. Lewis on Attidues and Impulses
From Mere Christianity:
Pesky trackback HTML.
Ooh, that’s a tough one to fix. Probably need to insert a </blockquote> at the beginning of your first comment.
I don’t have privelege to do that. If only we could train those leaving trackbacks 8p
Why don’t we start a culture of ‘First!’ posts that have the /blockquote tag in them. A pointless fad turned into something truely useful! No thanks needed, I’m working towards being a bodhisattva.
First!